Full Circle
by Alexandra Spar
Summary: A derelict ship from Red Dwarf's history bears not only much-needed supplies for the crimson short one but also a most unwelcome surprise. Turns out the holovirus aboard was made on the Dwarf. I CAN'T ACCESS REVIEWS; please email them to me.
1. Default Chapter

Disclaimer: _Red Dwarf_ and all related characters and indicia belong to Rob Grant and Doug Naylor, and possibly to the Beeb, not to me. Really. If I had them, would I be doing this? I think not. 

Full Circle

            "What the smeg is that?" 

            It looked, Lister thought, like nothing so much as a banged-up T-95 Headhunter, the sort of small transport craft used around the shuttle bases for taxi service—only something seemed to have tried its damnedest to bite the ship in half. Kryten tapped out commands on the consoles, and a couple of wireframe models appeared on the screens, turning clockwise. 

            "It appears to be a derelict spacecraft, sirs," said the mechanoid, typing. "Just scanning—yes—reading no lifeforms at all aboard. Just space debris." He gave them a lipless grin. 

            Lister frowned and slouched back in his seat, popping the top off another can of Leopard. "Where'd it come from? We're three million years out in deep space...who around here is going to be flying shuttlecraft?"

            "Are there any supplies on board, Kryten?" Rimmer was leaning against the Drive Room doorway, arms folded. "Not that it matters to _me, of course, but certain persons who shall remain nameless used up the last of the X-cell batteries to run their robot goldfish." He gave Lister a pointed look, which was met with blank preoccupation. _

            "Er, re-scanning," said Kryten. Lister reached the end of his train of thought, got off, and stood on the platform for a moment.

            "Hang on, man," he said. "What d'_you_ want X-cell batteries for, Rimmer? Got a personal leisure object what needs some juice?"

            Rimmer's nostrils flared. "Just what I'd expect, Listy, your mind's firmly in the gutter. I _happen_ to require X-cells for a new totally top secret experiment that I'm experimenting with. Secretly."

            "You," said Lister, crushing the can against his forehead, "are a smeghead, Rimmer. Well, Kryte? Got any good news?"

            The mechanoid turned to them. "It's absolutely fascinating, sirs. Apparently the craft is registered to the Jupiter Mining Corporation. It's one of our own shuttlecraft, lost three million years ago when the crew got wiped out."

            "Wait," said Lister. "So it was outside the _Dwarf_ when the drive plate exploded, and it just drifted until now? What're the odds that we've come across it now?"

            Holly's face appeared on the monitor screen. "Two hundred and sixty-three million to one, Dave."

            Lister gave her a weary look. "Fanks, Hol. Well? Anything useful, or do we just chalk this up to the "would you believe this" file and go to bed?"

            "The ship appears to contain some basic supplies," Kryten said. "The original manifest lists the entire second season of _Buffy the Vampire Slayer_ on disc."

            "Brutal," said Lister. "We go aboard."

            Rimmer rolled his eyes. "Oh, well. I suppose I can put off my very important plans for tonight so that you can dribble over some puerile twenty-first century telly series featuring a stunningly beautiful blonde girl in tight leather pants. Really, I don't know why I bother with you, Listy, I really don't."

**

            Lister woke up, clutching a pillow; he'd been in the middle of a particularly successful dream, and it took him a few minutes to realize that the pillow was not, in fact, who he thought it was. He shoved it aside and squinted at the clock, which read 3:14 AM.

            "What the smeg...?" he asked, aloud, and then realized what had woken him. There was a soft, miserable noise coming from the lower bunk. 

            Lister rolled over and peered over the edge of the bunk, locks hanging almost to the floor, and made out the form of Rimmer curled in a knot facing the wall, shivering. 

            Lister raised an upside-down eyebrow. "Lights," he said, and Holly lit the sleeping quarters. Eyes squinched almost shut against the sudden illumination, Lister stared at his bunkmate. "Rimmer?" he said, after a while. "Rimmer, what the smeg is up with you?"

            Rimmer didn't move; he was lying huddled against the back wall of the bunk, shoulders shaking. Every now and then he would emit a soft moan. 

            Lister rolled back onto his own bunk and scowled at the ceiling. He didn't particularly want to get up; in fact, what he really wanted was to wiggle his way back into the dream he'd been enjoying, but as long as Rimmer was whimpering like a recently-kicked puppy, that wasn't gonna happen. He heaved a long, put-upon sigh and vaulted out of the bunk.         

            "Rimmer, wake up," he said,  loudly. "You're having a nightmare or something, man."

            No response. He leaned over and cupped his hands around his mouth as a megaphone. "Wake up, you gimboid," he demanded.

            Still no response. Okay, time to bring out the big guns. "Yo, Bonehead!"

            Rimmer jerked awake and rolled over, gasping, eyes huge. Lister squinted at him: there must be something wrong with his lightbee or something, because he looked even paler than usual, and the shadows around his eyes looked bruised.

            "What did you call me?" he rasped.

            "Nothin'," said Lister. "You were having a nightmare, man. Woke me up out of a perfectly good dream."

            Rimmer shivered and pulled the covers over himself more tightly. "Oh," he said. "Sorry."

            Lister vaulted back up into his own bunk and told Holly to kill the lights. As he was drifting off, arms wrapped around Sarah Michelle Pillow, it vaguely occurred to him that it was completely against everything Rimmer stood for to apologize to him. Especially after "Bonehead."

            _Oh well, he thought drowsily. __What the smeg._

**

            "Yeeeeeoooooowwwww!" The Cat danced into the living quarters' dining room, resplendent in canary-yellow moire silk with black lapels. "Am I lookin' good, or am I lookin' _good_? Any more handsome and they'd have to raise me to sainthood!"

            Lister looked up from his breakfast (five samosas, six extra-spicy poppadoms with unidentifiable red sauce, and a six-pack of Leopard) and grinned. "What're you so chuffed about, Cat?"

            "I ain't seen goalpost-head _once_  today! That's a personal record!"

            Lister sat back, chewing. "Hey, you're right. He was still asleep when I got up, and that was about two in the afternoon. It's not like him."

            "Hey, who cares?" The Cat moonwalked over to the food dispenser and demanded fish; he joined Lister at the table and began to chant his food-taunting ritual. Lister ate a samosa with a meditative air. 

            "No, think about it, man. He's normally up at ten, I mean, the crack of _dawn. And he charges around the sleeping quarters making all the noise he possibly can and humming his stupid theme tune to himself before going off to find someone else to cheese off."_

            "So, he's decided to sleep in. So what?" The Cat flipped his salmon off the plate, caught it backhanded before it hit the floor, and growled at it. "Nothin' gets away from _this_ cat, little fishie." He gave Lister an enormous white grin and sank his teeth into the fish with evident delight. Lister pushed away his empty plate and lit a cigarette, ignoring the uncharacteristic flicker of concern for the hologram.

            "I'm going down the cinema," he said. "For once it'll be nice to watch me films without Rimmer sneering down me neck."

            "Buddy, that is one image I did _not need."_

            Kryten hummed the theme from _Androids_ to himself as he minced along the hallways, hoovering the space dust that collected in the corners of bulkheads, polishing doorplates, occasionally allowing himself a pause to apply Jiffy Windo-Kleen to a particularly dirty rivet-head. Times like this, when he was alone with the surfaces and the cleaning materials, when all there was in the universe was him and his duty—well, these were the best times of Kryten's life. 

            He swept a feather-duster along the edges of the door to Lister and Rimmer's quarters before palming the door-lock open and stepping inside. He'd taken to doing his main cleaning rounds now, in the middle of the afternoon, because it was the main time when both Lister and Rimmer were likely to be elsewhere—not underfoot, not complaining that their boxer shorts shouldn't bend or that their collection of Napoleon's war diaries had been filed in alphabetic, rather than chronological, order. Which is why it came as some surprise to him when a weak voice from the lower bunk disturbed him mid-clean. 

            "Mr. Rimmer, sir?" he asked, getting up and retracting his groinal floor-waxer attachment. "Mr. Rimmer, is there anything the matter?"

            Rimmer, still in bri-nylon pyjamas, was lying huddled on his side in his bunk. Hologramatic sweat sheened his face and throat. His eyes were dilated so far only a thin ring of hazel had escaped the black. He was shivering. Perhaps most telling, he no longer looked as if something unpleasant was trying to crawl up his nostrils; his normal expression had been replaced by one of weary pain.

            Kryten tilted his head. "Mr. Rimmer, sir, are you feeling quite well?"

            Sixty percent of Rimmer's typical look of petulant annoyance flickered across his features. "I'm just _peachy_, Kryten," he rasped. "What time is it?"

            "Half past three in the afternoon, sir," said Kryten, his brow ridges furrowed. "Can I get you anything?"

            Rimmer sat up, after a couple of attempts, and pulled a blanket round his shoulders. "You can tell me what the smeg was on that ship, Kryten. I feel like a mining juggernaut's run over me, and the stupid room won't stop going around....it's worse than the time Lister got me drunk and then downloaded eight months of his smegging memory into my core program, and that's _including_ the triple fried-egg chilli chutney sandwich." He coughed, painfully. "Well? Go! Get scanning, you novelty-condom-headed lavatory attendant...."

            Kryten watched as his eyes rolled up in his head and he slumped back to the pillows, let a few moments elapse, and turned to the monitor.  "Holly? I believe we have a situation."

            In the cinema, Lister was watching _It's A Wonderful Life_ for the 40, 362th time and ingesting an obscenely large amount of popcorn. The film had got to the part where George Bailey is begging for a loan from the evil bespectacled bank man, and Lister was amusing himself by flicking popcorn husks at the screen every time the evil bespectacled bank man appeared. There was quite a large heap of husks below the screen. 

            "Well," the evil bespectacled bank man was saying, "do you have any collateral for this loan?"

            "No."

            "Any assets at all?"

            "N---Dave? Sorry to cut in," said Holly, who had suddenly replaced Bedford Falls on the screen, "but we've got a bit of a problem."

            "Oh, smeg off, Hol," Lister groaned. "I'm watching the film."

            "It's Rimmer," said Holly, flatly. "He's caught something."

            "He wha?" Lister swigged down the rest of his bottle of vintage port. 

            "He's got some sort of virus." Holly rolled her eyes. 

            "Oh, _smeggin' 'ell_," Lister spat, sitting up straight. "Not again! Tell me he's not gonna go completely and totally spare and start shooting us with hexvision and wearing an outfit straight out of _Oklahoma, please, Hol!"_

            "Nah," said Holly. "Doesn't look like Lanstrom's holovirus."

            Lister sagged a bit in relief. "What do we do?"

            "We're thinking about that right now," Holly told him. He got up, tucking his popcorn under his arm, and headed back up to the living quarters with a resigned expression on his face.

            Rimmer was awake, lying on one of the medical bay's couches, by the time Lister arrived. He looked like hell, worse than Lister had felt when he'd caught mutated pneumonia in the officers' quarters a couple years ago. Kryten had got Holly to produce a hologramatic flannel, which he was wringing in cold water and smoothing over Rimmer's forehead.

            "Hey, man," said Lister, quietly. "How you feeling?"

            "Smegging awful," Rimmer rasped. "This is all your fault, Lister. You just _had_ to board that derelict yesterday, didn't you. Just _had _ to expose the entire crew to god knows what horrible alien plagues." He coughed painfully. "Well done, Listy. Operation Make Rimmer Miserable is a complete success."

            Lister sighed. "Look, Rimmer, man, the ship scanned clean. I wouldn't have gone aboard if there had been any reason to think it was dangerous."

            Rimmer closed his eyes. "Just smeg off, Lister, okay? Just go away."

            Lister shrugged. "Fine. I'll just go back to watching me film then, shall I."

            "Sir," Kryten interjected. "Mr. Rimmer is delirious. He doesn't know what he's saying—"

            "Yes I do," Rimmer said, without bothering to open his eyes.

            "—both Holly and I have scanned the derelict ship for any signs of dangerous pathogens and come up completely empty, Mr. Lister, sir. There's no way we could have known."

            Rimmer opened an eye and quickly shut it again. Lister shrugged. "Doesn't matter, does it? Hol, what do we know about Rimmer's virus?"

            "Hang on," said the computer, sounding preoccupied. "I've finally got into the derelict's long-term storage files. It seems...." She trailed off.

            "Yes? It seems what?" Rimmer demanded, sitting up with an effort. 

            "It seems the virus was made here," said Holly. "On _Red Dwarf."_

tbc


	2. 2

Disclaimer, as before: Red Dwarf, its characters and related insignia, and the whole idea of holoviruses in the first place, belong not to me but to Rob Grant, Doug Naylor, and whoever else is involved. There are a bunch of people with the name Elise Riley, but I don't think they're going to sue me. They'd be deeply disappointed if they tried. 

Full Circle 2

            "What do you mean, it was made on _Red Dwarf_?" Lister asked. "Did they have some kind of special holovirus laboratory that no one knew about?"

            "No," Holly told him. "Looks like it was an accident." She paused, her pixelized image flickering a bit as her concentration shifted from them to her databanks and back. "It was originally designed as an advanced computer program for compressing data, meant to be used to help transmit larger amounts of information with less time lag, which was one of the biggest problems with interstellar communication."

            "What happened?" Lister perched on the edge of a spare couch and rummaged for a cigarette. 

            "Apparently a corrupted string of code from another program got into it somehow—what they used to call a "worm" in the olden days. The compression program allowed the worm to reproduce itself much faster and spread to more and more computer systems." Holly shuddered. Now that the memory had been pulled up from long-term storage, she could vaguely remember what it had been like; a tiny hot thread of pain burrowing through her vast intellect, eating, growing, dividing, spreading. "They got rid of it by wiping a bunch of drives and tossing all the bits of it out into space, aboard the T-95 we encountered. According to my readings, it's....mutated. It's borderline sentient now."

            "Oh, smegging _wonderful_," said Rimmer morosely, and coughed. "I should've known. A _sentient virus."_

            "How do we get  rid of it?" Lister asked, wreathed in smoke, looking positively Delphic. "I mean, we can't do what we did before with Lanstrom's virus, can we?"

            "I'm afraid not, sirs," said Kryten, who had been diligently typing away during Holly's explanation. "The software is quite unlike anything I'm familiar with. By the time we bypassed Mr. Rimmer's holographic projection array, it would have found a way back in."

            "So that's it, is it?" Rimmer slumped back to the couch and stared at the ceiling miserably. "Nice to've known you, so long, have a nice second death, Rimsy?"

            "Shut up, Rimmer," said Lister, mildly, and blew a smoke ring through the expanding center of its predecessor. "Hol, who designed this thing in the first place?" He ignored Rimmer's look of death. 

            "I'll check," said the computer, and a moment later her face was replaced by a JMC ident card. "Second Communications Officer Elise Riley was in charge of the project and wrote most of the code. Technical Officer Fourth Class Mark Linden was the project coordinator."

            "What's the status of their personality discs?" Lister wanted to know. Both Rimmer and Kryten stared at him. 

            "Linden's disc was damaged but may be playable. Riley's was untouched in the accident."

            "Well," said Lister. "What're you waiting for? Bring 'er back and get her to fix Rimmer. We can always wipe her again once we're done."

            "What?" Rimmer croaked. 

            "Look, it's simple." Lister toyed with his locks, absently sucking on one of them when he discovered an untapped reservoir of mango chutney. "Holly _can support two holograms at once if we cut down all unnecessary power and don't try to maneuver the ship too fast. Remember when you copied your disc and brought back a duplicate of yourself and you started playing "I'm a bigger smeghead than you" and ended up screaming at each other all night in language I didn't know you knew? No worries."_

            Rimmer propped himself up on an elbow. "He was a total git. Impossible to get along with. It wasn't my fault."

            Lister grinned and refrained from launching into the familiar argument. "Hol?"

            Holly's brows plaited themselves. "I suppose it's possible," she said. Kryten was looking disconsolate, but said nothing, and after a moment Holly nodded. "I've rerouted the power to the hologram projection suite. It should work."

            "Right," said Lister, and jumped off the couch, cracking his neck. "I'll go down and turn her on," he added, with a grin, nudging Kryten. "Get it? Turn her on." 

            Rimmer looked up at Kryten with a despairing sigh, as Lister bopped out of the medical unit. "I haven't got a chance," he said. 

**

            One moment there had been red warning lights on the console in front of her, and then there hadn't been any lights anywhere at all. The world had turned itself off.

            Which is why it was extremely odd to find that it had suddenly turned itself back on. She looked around: instead of the banks of consoles and monitors of the Drive room, there was what looked like an endless library of small disc boxes flanking a narrow corridor and a funny-looking control panel. 

            And a funny-looking individual standing at the control panel. 

            "What the smeg," began Riley, but he cut her off. 

            "Officer Elise Riley? Welcome back. You're a hologram."

            Riley looked down at herself: same blue Space Corps JMC uniform, same insignia of office. She looked solid enough. Raising a hand to her head, she felt her normal rock-hard bun at the back of her skull, her normal bone structure....and a hard plastic H stuck on her forehead. "Oh, _hell," she said. "Who're you?"_

            The man came forward. He was wearing an amusing collection of leather and rags which wouldn't have looked out of place in the Mad Max movies, and had a stupid leather deerstalker on his head from underneath of which three or four long Rasta locks hung over his shoulders. His face was set in an expression of terminal good-naturedness. "Lister," he said, in a Liverpool accent that could bend spoons, "Dave Lister. It's a long story, but I used to be a technician on the ship before the accident and I survived cos I was in suspended animation. It's been three million years, by the way."

            "Three million years," said Riley. 

            "Yep. I'd shake your hand, but, you know." He grinned. "Sorry to just yank you back into existence, and that, but we've got a problem we need your help with."

            "Wait," said Riley, shaking her head.  "Hang about. I need to get some of this straight, okay? I'm dead. I've been dead for three million years."

            "Yeah," said Lister. 

            "Who else is on the ship?"

            "Holly, of course," said Lister, "Kryten, who's a mechanoid, Cat, who sort of evolved from my cat, and Rimmer. Who's a hologram like you."

            "Don't take this wrong," said Riley, "but what the smeg do you want _me for? I'm a Communications Officer. I mean, you got a frequency you need tuned, I'm your girl. Translating from any of five different languages into any other of five different languages, _c'est moi_. Want a lecture on the development of the sub-ether comnet, right here. But I mean..." She trailed off, hands spread._

            Lister's grin turned into a determined expression. "Come on," he said. "I'll show you."

**

            "It won't work," said Rimmer. "Of course it won't work. Nothing ever works for me."

            "Aaah, don't start _that_ again, man," said the Cat, who had mooched in shortly after Lister had gone to reactivate the communications officer, and who looked as if he was regretting it. "You sound like a scratched CD, Grand Canyon Nostrils. 'My life sucks. My life sucks. My life sucks.'"

            "Actually it's my _death_ that's sucking," said Rimmer, staring moodily at the ceiling. "Death number one. We have yet to see how death number two will go, but I'm laying money on it that it'll be slow and painful and undignified."

            The Cat tilted his head. "No argument here," he said. "Slow, painful and undignified's about your style."

            "You're really not helping," said Rimmer, absently. 

            "Why not look on the bright side?" the Cat suggested. "You won't have to bunk with Monkey-man any more."

            "You make a valid point." 

            "That's cause I'm so clever," the Cat said smugly, and got up. "Well, all this talking's made me hungry. I'm off to find some food."

            "How many times a day do you eat?" asked Rimmer, still regarding the ceiling as if it had personally insulted him. 

            "Who keeps count?" The Cat danced out of the medical bay, leaving Rimmer alone with the ceiling. He shivered miserably and curled up on his side, his mind settling immediately back into its normal pastime of rerunning his most painfully embarrassing failures. There was the greyish blur of his childhood, mostly seen through clumps of various sorts of filth into which his brothers and classmates had chucked him; there was the stomach-churningly awful day he realized he could never in a million years make it into the Academy, and had tried to rationalize his decision to join the _Dwarf_ as a vending-machine repairman by re-reading the story of Lord Nelson;  there were the thirteen consecutive attempts to pass the astronavigation attempt, and the equal number of times he'd ended up in the medical bay after each abortive struggle to remember _any of the things he'd studied; there was, of course, gazpacho soup. _

            _I suppose I won't care much, once I'm deactivated, he thought to himself, bathing once more in the brilliant toe-curling agony of the gazpacho soup incident. __If that's the silver lining in this particular cloud, it's true that there is a God, and that he hates me. _

Rimmer slithered off the medical bay's couch, wrapping the blankets around his shivering shoulders, and stumbled off in the direction of the sleeping quarters. Maybe his own bed would be warmer, or the room might stop doing a pavane in G minor. Maybe they'd leave him alone and let him sleep. 

            Riley followed Lister through the corridors of the ship, her eyes wide and almost colourless in the dim light. She'd never realized how loud the air-conditioning lifeplant was—in the absence of rubber bootsoles squeaking, crewmembers talking, Holly's voice making announcements over the tannoy, and the endless chirrup of personal communicators, the roaring of the lifeplant seemed deafening. They passed sector after sector of deserted living quarters, passing the science labs and the cryostorage facility, and made their way to the medical unit. Riley blinked in the sudden whiteness.

            "Good God," she said. "Weren't you male before, Holly?"

            "It's a long story," said Lister, staring at an empty couch with a frown. "Hol, where's he got to?"

            "He's back in the sleeping quarters. Buggered off shortly before you got back." The computer's digital face turned to examine Riley, who stood her ground. "'Ere," said Holly, "I remember you. You're that officer who got passed over for promotion after that to-do with the Captain's personal communicator."

            Riley sighed. "What? It was an honest mistake. And why are you suddenly a blonde with a Mary Quant fringe?"

            "I fell in love, if you must know," said Holly, "and decided to change my face to Hilly's face."

            Riley's smile got a bit more brittle, and she turned to Lister. "How long have I been out, did you say? Three million years? Holly's been alone in space for three million years?"

            "Well, three million and a bit," said Lister. "C'mon, we've got to get started."

            "Get started doing what?"

            "Uh," said Lister, "there's no good way to say this, but we need you to fix one of our crew who's got a holovirus that apparently evolved from your invention."

            Riley stared. "My invention? You mean the compression software?"

            "Yeah," said Holly. "Apparently it's mutated itself into something new and improved. It's draining the energy from our resident hologram."

            "Oh," said Riley. There didn't seem to be anything else to say. 


	3. 3

Full Circle 3

Disclaimer as before: I don't own nothin 'cept Elise Riley, and I know I don't own that name. Lawsuits will result in a great deal of disappointment. 

            Riley slid behind one of the consoles and called up the original data for her code. Behind her, Lister sucked on one of his locks and managed to put forth an air of looking over her shoulder despite being across the room. 

            "What the _smeg_?" she muttered, looking at the lines of code. "This is insane. This reads like AI code, not like compression software. Holly, can you show me the hologramatic projection array program?"

            Holly, who was particularly proud of her blonde locks and hadn't liked the jab at her hairstyle, let alone the inference that she'd gone computer senile over the past three million years, was busy removing the simulated pins that held Riley's simulated hair in its neat knot. "Oh," she said, "right. Hang on a mo." The huge screens above the medicomp unit lit up with scrolling characters, green on black, looking not unlike the visual representation of a complicated AR program made famous by a 21st century film series. Riley swiped hair out of her face absently and began typing again, her gaze flicking from the big screens to the console monitor and back. 

            "I think I can see what happened here," she muttered, almost to herself. "It's changing, though...it's like it's aware of what I'm doing..."

            "What does that mean?" Lister wanted to know.

            "Well, you said it was affecting the other hologram," said Riley. "Why isn't it affecting me? And if it's changing itself it may be doing interesting and new things to...Rimmer, you said his name was." She tucked the hair behind her ear again irritably. 

            Holly exchanged a glance with Lister. "It's not affecting you," said the computer, working this out, "because your disk was recorded using a slightly different program than Rimmer's was. You joined the crew after he did, and the personality recording software had been upgraded. You're version 2.1, he's version 1.9."

            "Poor Rimmer, man," said Lister, smoking a cigarette Riley thought he probably shouldn't have had in the medical unit, "he's being obsoleted to death." There was a hint of a grin in his voice, but Riley didn't turn around to look. 

            "Brilliant," she said, sourly, still typing fast. "One of you might wanna go see what it's doing to him now. The corruption's spread further."

            Lister hopped off the chair. "I'll go." He didn't particularly want to be around when the communications officer realized that Holly had replaced her blue JMC uniform jacket with a T-shirt that read "Copacabana Hawaiian Cocktail Bar Dancer-Do Not Tip."

**

            Lister hurried down the corridor to their sleeping quarters. He kind of liked Riley, despite the fact that she was as far from his type as it was possible to be: dark-blonde, with a sharp pointed face, not much patience, and not much of a noticeable sense of humour. He had to admit that perhaps he didn't know all the aspects of her personality yet, but it would be one smeg of a laugh watching her and Rimmer interact. 

            He ducked under the hatchway. It was dark in the sleeping quarters, and he felt his way to Rimmer's pink student lamp and flicked it on. 

            There was a moan which might have been a curse. "Turn it off, you goit," Rimmer rasped from the shadows of the bottom bunk. "I may be going blind but I haven't got there yet..." He lost the sentence in a spasm of coughing. Lister raised an eyebrow and peered into the shadows, making out the form of Rimmer curled under the covers with his hands over his eyes. 

            Lister flicked the light off again. "I was gonna ask how you were feeling," he said, "but on second thought I don't think I will." The darkness began to fade as his eyes grew adjusted to the gloom. He could make out the "This Is The First Day Of The Rest Of Your Death" plaque above Rimmer's bed. 

            "Just go away, Lister," Rimmer croaked. "I don't particularly feel like having witnesses at death number two, okay?"

            "You're not gonna die," said Lister, a second before realizing the incongruity of this statement. "Again, I mean. We got someone working on it."

            "Oh good. I'm just _filled_ with confidence at the thought of an expert handpicked by _you_ trying to save me."

            "Rimmer, man, you never change, do you? You're a complete and total smeghead." Lister pulled up a chair by the bunk. "You ever realize why you didn't have any friends?"

            "That's right, Listy," Rimmer croaked. "Put me down when I'm smegging _dying_."

            Lister ignored this. "The reason you didn't have any friends," he continued, "well-besides your 'casual clothes'-is that you have the social graces of an iguana." He paused, thinking. "A brain-damaged iguana."

            "Oh, that's rich. This coming from someone who thinks the epitome of sartorial elegance is having at least two of the buttons on his trouser fly still in place." Rimmer coughed again, curling up. "I'm not taking charm-school lessons from Dave 'I can do things with my bodily orifices that no one's hitherto thought of, for a good reason' Lister."

            "You remember that one time you were telling me how I was a triple fried-egg chilli chutney sandwich, Rimmer?" Lister asked. "Well...you were drunk, but you were missing the point, man. All my ingredients may be wrong, but at least I don't shove people away when they're tryin' to help. That may be why I'm not such a complete and utter gimboid."

            "I do not do that. Are you saying I do that? You've got your head up your behind again, Lister."

            "You ever listen to a word you say?" Lister paused. "Oh, wait, you did, didn't you. Only your response was generally 'shut up you dead git.'"

            Rimmer sat up, his eyes dilated black with pain, glittering in the dimness.  Lister noticed vaguely that his H was also glittering, as if it were somehow enhanced more than usual. "Shut up, Lister. Just...shut...up, all right? I'm not in the mood for this."

            Lister sighed. Just a bit further.... "You're never in the _mood_, man. You've always got something _better_ to do than sit down and actually think about why you're so smegging miserable. It's never your fault, is it, Rimmer?"

            "Of course it's not my fault! I-" Rimmer's cough cut him off again, the sound harsh and painful, deep in his chest; when the fit passed, he didn't say anything for a long moment, and when he did, it made Lister grin in the darkness. "I hate you, you know," he rasped, wearily. "Stop being so smegging right all the time."

            Lister sat back, not saying anything immediately, waiting for the implications to sink into his bunkmate's mind. After a while Rimmer lay back again, lacing his fingers behind his head, and sighed. "Well?" he asked. "Aren't you going to say I told you so?"

            "Nah," Lister drawled. "Feel better for saying it?"

            "Not much." Rimmer regarded the underside of the top bunk.  "What's going on with your expert?"

            "She seemed to be getting right into it," Lister said. "Only I think she got up Holly's nose. When I left Holly was doing amusing things to her uniform."

            "What's she like?" Rimmer coughed, all the pique gone from his tone, replaced with a bone-weariness that made Lister feel tired just hearing it.     

            Lister shrugged.  "She's a version 2.1 hologram, man. Not affected by the virus."

            "Figures." Again, there was no vitriol in the hologram's voice; just a sort of self-denigrating lack of surprise. "Why don't you just wipe me and have done with it?"

            "You want me to answer that?" Lister asked. 

            Rimmer rolled over and looked at him. "Yeah, I think I do."

            "Because without you, who would the Cat have to call 'Grand Canyon Nostrils'?"           

            "Ah," said Rimmer, thoughtfully. "Well, then."

            "Yeah," said Lister. The silence became slightly more comfortable. 

            **

            "I think I've located the source," said Riley, still typing. Her hair was now in a snarl of elflocks mostly tucked behind her ears, and Holly had run out of amusing T-shirt slogans to simulate, so that she was now wearing a pink sequined tube top two sizes too small. "It looks like it got in via a minor coding error, and then had three million years to work its way inside. If I can stop it reproducing itself we might have a chance." She kept typing, the lines of code scrolling jerkily down the monitors all around the medical unit. To Holly's chagrin, much of the code was completely incomprehensible; the computer had a nasty feeling that once she would have been able to understand exactly what was going on, a lot faster than Riley, but three million years of entropy had taken its toll on her neural circuits.  She could just about figure out what Riley meant about the software having been corrupted and then reproducing parts of the code over and over to create a completely new program, but beyond that it was all Esperanto to her. 

            "Got you," said Riley, and pushed her chair away from the keyboard. "Put in a block to stop it reproducing itself." 

            "So that's it?" Holly asked. "You're done?"

            "Not quite." The communications officer stretched hugely, rubbing at the back of her neck. She either hadn't noticed the pink spangly tube top or didn't care, which piqued Holly slightly; all those sequins were jolly hard to simulate. "I've stopped it getting worse," she continued. "But I can't reverse the damage it's already done without some complicated reprogramming. I think maybe I'd better see your hologram."

            Holly quickly replaced the tube top with Riley's normal uniform jacket. She looked down at herself, grinned, and turned to face the computer. "Come on," she said. "You can do better than this."

            Holly squinted briefly; there was a loud "pop" and Riley was standing in a nurse's uniform four sizes too small. She snorted. "A little more tasteful, please."

            This time Holly put her in a scaled-down version of the uniform Rimmer normally wore: green bri-nylon tunic, dark-green side striped trousers, polished boots. Riley nodded. "The hair?"

            Holly sighed and replaced the mess she'd made with Riley's neat knot of hair. "Anything else? Perhaps you'd like a martini while I'm at it, or a nose job?"

            "Not a bad idea," Riley mused, "but perhaps not right now. What's the number again?"

            Holly gave her the number of the sleeping quarters Lister shared with Rimmer. She turned on her heel and headed out, musing that if she'd actually had time to think hard about any of the things she was doing, she'd probably just have had hysterics. Not only was she dead, and had been dead for three million years, she was now attempting to fix the source code for a program she had written three million years before in order to save the "life" of another dead person she'd never even met. It was the sort of thing she occasionally experienced in dreams after having drunk too much. 

            _Red Dwarf_ had undergone some amusing changes since everyone had died, Riley mused, as she hurried down the corridors. The walls that had been Ocean Grey were now Military Grey-or was it the other way around? Riley could never remember-and someone had carefully removed all the Esperanto translations from the wall signs. 

            Here it was. She knocked on the hatchway door, and after a moment it hissed aside to reveal Lister. The room was dark; in fact, the only light was from the floor-edge emergency exit lights and the tip of Lister's cigarette. Riley had a sudden urge for a cig herself, and wondered if Holly could simulate a nicotine rush. 

            "Ullo," said Lister. "How's it going?"

            "I think I've stopped things getting any worse," she said. He nodded and moved aside. 

            "I'll give you two some privacy. Nice outfit," he told her, with a grin. "Suits you."

            Riley raised an eyebrow, not entirely sure if he was taking the smeg, and slipped past him into the dimness of the sleeping quarters. Her eyes adjusted slowly to the darkness; after a while she could make out a figure huddled on the lower bunk, a hologramatic H symbol gleaming dully on his forehead. 

            She sat down, wondering what exactly she was doing. What was she going to say? 'Er, hello, I've been brought back from the dead to possibly stop a program I once wrote from destroying you utterly, only I don't know if I can, it's nice to meet you?'

            "So you're the expert," said the hologram on the bunk. His voice was strained, with a hint of upper-class Io in the vowels, utterly weary. "What an introduction to the afterlife."

            "You're Rimmer," said Riley, stupidly. "Why is that name familiar?"

            "My brothers," he said, tiredly. "All three of them, Space Corps superstars. John the captain; Frank the first officer; Howard the test pilot."

            Riley thought. Yeah, there'd been all that to-do about John Rimmer, when she'd still been in the Academy: youngest Captain in the history of the Corps, the poster-boy for space exploration. "Was he the one who looked a bit like an Action Man doll?"

            Rimmer chuckled dryly; it made him cough. "They all did. Golden boys, all three of them."

            "And you?"

            "Arnold Judas Rimmer," said Rimmer, in the darkness; "second technician, beverage service, maintenance and repair. I was the bloke who cleaned the gunk out of the chicken-soup machine nozzles. Also famous for buggering up the repairs on the drive plate and causing the instantaneous flash-frying of everyone aboard _Red Dwarf _save Lister and his pregnant cat." 

            Riley stared into the shadows; all she could really make out was the occasional gleam of the H on his forehead. "You," she said. "You were responsible for that?"

            "Yes, ma'am," said Rimmer, and sketched a salute. "I am personally responsible for your death."

             Riley sat still for a long time before reaching out and flicking on the main chamber illumination. 

            He winced away from the light, squeezing his eyes shut. She didn't move, letting her eyes adjust to the sudden brilliance, staring at him. 

            She supposed it made sense, on a ship with a crew numbering in the thousands, that she'd never met him before. She would have remembered him. It was probably impossible to forget those nostrils, even if you tried.  

            He was tall, as far as she could tell, but currently curled in a miserable knot, and rangy rather than slender. His hair was uncompromisingly brown, without gold lights or glints of red, and carefully combed into the most unattractive style possible above a face that was all sharp, mistrustful angles and points. His nose featured wide, flaring nostrils that put Riley vaguely in mind of the air intakes on a swoop bike. Taken separately, none of his features were particularly prepossessing, but there was something about his face that Riley found strangely compelling, even though he was roughly the colour of cottage cheese and sheened with sweat. 

            He took his hands away, slowly, and looked at her with bright, dilated hazel eyes. "Well?" he asked. "Aren't you going to tell me what a smeghead I am?"

            "I don't think it's necessary," said Riley, slowly. "Why were you reactivated?"

            Some unidentifiable emotion flickered in the depths of Rimmer's eyes. "To keep Lister sane," he told her, rasping a bit. "Not one of Holly's more inspired decisions. I found out that it was because he and I had shared more conversations than any other crew member on the manifest, most of which consisted of 'you're a total gimboid'."

            Riley rubbed at the H on her forehead. "Are you saying you were brought back from the dead to keep someone company whom you never liked and who never liked you, and you had to do this while all the time being reminded that it was you who had killed the entire crew in the first place?"

            "That's about the size of it." Rimmer coughed, coughed again, turning away from her and burying his face in the crook of his elbow as the fit shook him. Without thinking, Riley reached out and put a hand on his shoulder to steady him.

            He jerked away from her, then went very still, his coughing forgotten. Very slowly he turned back, his face frozen in an expression of such profound and terrible hope that it made Riley go cold all over. 

            "You can _touch_ me," he rasped. "You can..."

            "Of course I can touch you," said Riley. "I'm a hologram too." She tapped her H.

            "You don't understand," Rimmer breathed. "I haven't....touched anyone in three million years....hell, longer than that."

            Riley blinked, understanding in a rush, and something she totally didn't understand made her reach out slowly for his hand. He stared at her, eyes wide, and held up his right hand, palm out, fingers spread. Riley's hand met his, palm to palm, and even she could feel the weird tingle of electricity as their lightbees exchanged spatial information. 

            "Oh, God," he muttered, head bowed. Riley could feel the unnatural heat of his hologramatic fever, the way he was shaking, and sighed to herself. A moment later he started coughing again, painfully, and without thinking about it at all she put an arm around him and let him lean against her. He clung to her like a limpet, clearly not thinking about what he was doing, and she let him; she could hardly imagine what it had been like, alone with a mechanoid and a living human and Holly-especially Holly-and some sort of catlike organism, unable to touch anyone or be touched, a ghost made of light. 

            His coughing eased slowly, but she made no move to push him away; his head rested on her shoulder, and after a while her hand crept up to stroke his hair. 


	4. 4

Disclaimer, as before: je n'ai pas les droits legales de Red Dwarf. 

            Full Circle Four

            The Cat slid backwards into the Drive room, balancing a balloon-glass of milk on his fingertips. He'd changed out of his canary-yellow moire suit and was now wearing a military-styled logan cloak over a perfectly-cut navy-blue tunic, matching trousers, and thigh-high suede boots. The effect was somewhat schizophrenic and put one in mind of a Napoleonic officer who'd suddenly developed an urge to go clubbing in the East Village. "Don't tell anyone," he hissed to Lister, who was reading a magazine, "but I smell a stranger aboard. I say we hide until it shows itself, and then cream the sucker."

            "Calm down, Cat," Lister murmured, turning the mag sideways and allowing the centerfold to unfold itself, "it's just Riley. The new hologram."

            "What new hologram?" demanded the Cat, putting down his drink, his brows arching elegantly. "Do _not_ be telling me that we have another double goalpost-head situation on our hands. I don't have the wardrobe to counteract twice the bri-nylon badness."

            Lister looked up, with some regret. "Naw, man, the new hologram's a comm officer we brought back to try and fix Rimmer. She's with him now." He didn't inform the Cat that Riley was in fact wearing Rimmer's uniform. He wanted to see that particular feline expression of horror for himself.

            "She?" repeated the Cat. "She as in _female_? As in _soft and squishy_?"

            "Calm down, man. She's a _hologram_. You can't do anything to her." _Even if she let you_, Lister added mentally. "'Sides, she's not your type."

            The Cat nodded knowingly. "She's ugly, huh?"

            "Not really." Lister removed his boots from the console and stretched. "She's just...not your type."

            The Cat folded his arms and thought about this, tapping a fingernail against one of his gleaming eyeteeth. "I don't think I'm getting you, Buddy," he said after a while. "She's female, but she's not my type?"

            "Oh, forget it," said Lister. "Hol, any news on Rimmer's condition?"

            "He's stable," said the computer, her face blooming into existence on one of the Drive room screens, "but he's not well. We need to extract all the bits of the code from his program."

            "Well?" Lister asked, folding his arms. "How do we do that?"

            "Not sure." Holly paused. "I've computed the likelihood that we can remove the virus from his program without wiping him as well, and it's either one in 2502.2 or one in 250.22. I'm not sure where the decimal point ought to be."

            "You're the smegging computer," said Lister, "compute."

            "I'd like to see _you_ try it," snapped Holly. "Kryten's on screen three. He wants to talk to you."

            Lister sighed. "Put him through." Beside him, the Cat drained his glass and polished the seat of one of the Drive chairs carefully with a handkerchief before planting his tailored posterior on it. Kryten's angular face replaced Holly on the screens.

            "What is it, Kryte?" Lister asked.

            "Mr. Lister, sir," said Kryten. "I believe we need to discuss the question of where Miss Riley will be residing during her stay here."

            "What?" Lister frowned.

            "Well, she _is_ a Second Communications Officer," said Kryten, "in addition to being of the female persuasion. It would hardly be suitable for her to be sharing quarters with you or Mr. Rimmer, or Mr. Cat." Kryten's voice held an unmistakable note of disapproval; Lister wondered whether it was directed at the concept of a holo-female sharing rooms with them, or the concept of a holo-female at all. 

            "Kryten," he said wearily, "I don't think anybody gives a smeg where she sleeps. She's only here to fix Rimmer. It's not like she's taking over command of the ship."

            "She can share my quarters," grinned the Cat.

            "I'll take that suggestion into consideration," said Kryten, deadpan. "Meanwhile, Mr. Lister, when shall I serve dinner?"

            Lister sighed, checked his watch. "I dunno, soon? Holly, when are we going to know if we can get the virus out of Rimmer?"

            "That depends on Riley. Whenever she gets out of there and starts doing some work, you can ask her yourselves."

            The Cat thumped the console. "Is he gonna die or not? I need to know so I can plan my outfits. I got this really nice black silk suit with astrakhan facings and carved onyx buttons, it's just been _waiting_ for a funeral, or maybe a goth theme party. Or it could work as one stylin' vampire costume. You think this Riley chick digs vampires?"

            Lister shot him a look. "Kryten," he said, "why don't you get dinner ready in the officers' club. I'll be there in ten minutes."

            "Certainly, sir," said the mechanoid, and clicked off the transmission. The Cat looked at Lister, wounded. 

            "It's a _good_ suit, Buddy," he said. "You don't know what you're missing."

            **

            Lister knocked on the hatchway to their sleeping quarters, absently playing with the badges on his leather jacket. After a moment the door hissed aside and Riley stepped out, a few tendrils of pale hair escaping from her chignon. "Well?" he asked.

            She shook her head. "He's not getting any worse, but he's in lousy shape. I'll need total access to the holographic projection array mainframe."

            Lister nodded. "C'mon," he said. "Let's get Holly to splice you in."

**

            Back in the darkened quarters, Rimmer stared wide-eyed into the darkness and clutched the hologramatic blankets closer. He'd _touched_ her. He'd _been_ touched. How long had it been...?

            She wasn't pretty. Not pretty like Janine, his brother's wife. God, Janine had been lovely, long brown hair, high cheekbones, the legs of a model. Riley, on the other hand, was a bit on the short side, and her face was pointier than what was considered beautiful. Her eyes weren't the cerulean blue of his dream women, but a mixture of green and grey; her lips were ordinary pinkish lip-colour, not the brilliant cherry-red he vaguely thought women's lips should be; he couldn't really form an opinion of her hair, as it'd been pulled tightly back into a knot at the back of her skull. Nor had she been wearing a revealing PVC outfit, as most of his dream women had been, or holding a whip: somehow it hadn't seemed strange to see his own dark-green uniform curving around her body, complete with rank-pips on the collar and white steel comm badge. It had seemed....right.

            He lay back against the pillows, shivering. It had been so bloody long since he'd felt another hand touch his, let alone felt someone's arms around him, someone holding him close, despite the fact that he was second technician A. J. Rimmer, B.Sc, S.Sc, utter and complete failure. She hadn't known him, of course. She hadn't known what a total smeghead he was. That was why she'd allowed him to bury his face in her shoulder and cling to her. It was the only explanation. 

            Rimmer sighed. He could still feel her hand absently stroking his hair; it was as if something had gone wrong in his sensory retrieval/replay program and he was experiencing a replay loop. For some reason the pain seemed to have gone away for a little while, when she'd been there; now that she was gone, it was coming back. He hurt all over, as if he'd been cross-country skiing. The worst of the pain was centered in his chest, roughly where the lightbee hung; it felt like iron bands around his ribcage, gently being riveted tighter and tighter. His head hurt too, but not as badly, and his fever was doing a happy little hallucinogenic dance in his mind. 

            _At least_, he thought vaguely, _I've been touched again. I've touched someone again. _Images from the rest of the day trickled back into his mind: Lister goading him into admitting he was right, the strange companionable silence that had followed; the darkness into which Riley had entered, the calm with which she'd taken his assertion that he'd pretty much killed her and the rest of the crew through his incompetence....

            Suddenly Rimmer didn't really want it to be over. He sat up again, coughing, wrapping his arms around his knees. It was funny how you didn't really see things clearly until they were being taken away from you. 

            He really didn't want to die again. He'd given up, before. That was before he'd felt someone else's fingers touching his own. Before he'd even considered the possibility that he could interact with people again. 

            He buried his face in his knees, hoping against hope that they'd be able to fix him. 

**

            The Cat, who'd swapped his Napoleonic outfit for a red PVC tuxedo with matching cane and top hat, sauntered into the officers' club and took a seat at the table. Lister was already there, watching as Kryten set dishes out and swept off silver covers to reveal his latest culinary tour de force. Lister couldn't really remember when they'd started doing formal dinner, but it seemed to make the mechanoid happy, and it gave the Cat another reason to change. All for the best. 

            "So when are we gonna get to see this woman goalpost-head?" the Cat demanded, tweaking the crease in his shiny red pants back to perfect straightness and regarding Lister expectantly. "My nipples are tingling again."

            "Spare me," said Lister, spearing a shami kebab with his fork and biting the end off it. "She's still busy trying to get the virus out of Rimmer's program."

            "I did invite her to join us, sirs," said Kryten, hovering beside Lister with a tray of poppadoms. "She said she was a hologram, if I recalled, and she didn't need to eat, and she was busy. I must say, Mr. Lister, sir, she doesn't have the most elegant manners I've ever encountered."

            "She's had a lot thrown at her," Lister pointed out. "I mean, being brought back from the dead and being asked to fix a program she wrote three million years ago because it's screwing with the program of some dead guy she never even met before, man, it's gotta be hard."

            "Hmf," said Kryten, and added, changing the subject, "is the fish to your liking, sir?"

            The Cat looked up from his entrée aquarium, reeling in a squiggling _Betta splendens_. "I'm gonna eat you, little fishie," he chanted, waving the fish at Kryten, who nodded happily, satisfied.  Lister sighed, returning his wandering attention to the food, trying not to think about how supremely weird his life was. _Better than living in a luggage locker on Mimas,_ he reflected, vaguely enjoying the sensation of massive amounts of capsaicin attacking his taste buds. _But a lot stranger._     

**

            Riley's lightbee sat dark and still on the countertop in the computer vault, not currently in use. The device, about an inch long and shaped like two tiny metal cones placed end to end, with the tips facing out, normally hovered on a self-generated antigrav field, projecting the visual image of the second comm officer; now, since she was currently a collection of electrical impulses flickering through the massive arrays of the hologramatic projection database, she didn't need it.  If she managed to achieve what she was trying to do, Holly would unsplice her data stream from the main computers and reload her into the bee. If she didn't, there wouldn't be much point for her continued existence in any form, as she would have failed at the task for which they'd brought her back. 

            It was jolly strange being a bodiless electrical impulse, she reflected, as she traveled  through the data conduits. Her mind was processing the input as best it could, and providing her with a sort of visual representation of where she was: it looked like a big black empty space, with green glowing points of light here and there. If she concentrated, she could steer herself towards these points of light, and she had found that it was possible to move them about from place to place. Holly had explained briefly what she would have to do, but it was still difficult to get used to.

            The points of light were elements of software, as far as she could make out, and manipulating them altered the coding directly, which was a lot faster and easier than trying to rewrite the code manually from the desktop interface. She nudged aside a few blocks on the security programs, and slipped into the main hologramatic projection array. 

            Ah, this was more like it. Now the points of light were much more frequent and closer together, and in the darkness ahead she could just make out a line of orange light that most certainly should not have been there. _That's it_, she thought to herself. _That's the virus. I've stopped it reproducing itself, but I have to get it out of here entirely. _

            She let herself slide forward, past chunks of code limiting the spatial movement of projected holograms, through an interesting little subroutine which prevented holograms from reporting for duty in ginger toupees, and watched the virus move. It was like nothing so much as a long poison-orange nematode, stretching and wriggling its way through the maze of light. In its wake she could see that the programming it touched was damaged, the green light dimmed and faded with the energy it was sucking out of the array—and out of Rimmer. 

            Riley wondered vaguely what she was going to do when she got to it. She had no weapons, no real way to damage or destroy the thing. She would just have to find a way to confuse it.

            _How do you confuse a mindless rogue computer program?_

_            Oh, smeg. _

...to be continued.


	5. 5

Full Circle Five

Again, I own not la petite rouge bateau d'etoiles, nor the people on it, save Riley. 

(AN: I'm writing this in my own apartment, sitting on my own couch and watching my own telly. This exhilaration may be why this chapter sucks arse.)

_Bury me above the clouds, all the way from here   
Take away the things I need   
Take away my fear   
Hide me in a hollow sound   
Happy ever more,   
Everything I had to give gave out long before _

_ Fix me now, I wish you would..fix me now   
Bring me back to life_

_Fix me now   
Kiss me blind, somebody should_

_Fix me now   
From hollow into light _

-Garbage

            Riley let herself float, spreading her cybernetic being along the channels of the holo projection array, feeling the flickering almost-shocks of energy passing down circuits, the bone-shaking hum of electricity going about its business. The orange _C. elegans_ of the virus was curled comfortably around a chunk of programming ahead of her, not moving. It was bigger than she'd thought, now she was close to it. There was no differentiation between segments: it was a long, glowing, orange slice of poisonous light.

            _I have to distract it_, she thought again. _Have to get it out of the delicate bits of Rimmer's program and make it go somewhere else...somewhere where it can be deleted, without destroying him. Or me. Or the array. _

She nudged forward a little, and the virus-worm twitched and nosed its form out from the subroutine it was embracing. All around her the green pulses of light grew more rapid, with the change in energy drain; she felt it inside herself, a thrill of fear borne not of somatic sensation but of shifts in her own electronic existence. It was one of the strangest things she'd ever experienced, and one of the most unpleasant. 

            Off to one side she could make out a darker green set of light-points which part of her recognized as an old dormant routine describing the projection of version 1.8 holograms. _That's it. That's where I have to take it. We don't have any v 1.8 holos on board: it's redundant. _

She didn't think about the fact that "we" consisted of one live human, one feline lifeform, one mechanoid, and currently two dead people. 

The virus nosed out further, and Riley went cold all over with fear. The worst part of the whole situation was the fact that she was responsible for this thing's existence in the first place; this was _her fault_, indirectly. She couldn't quite get the image of Rimmer's face out of her mind. 

            She slid sideways, behind subroutines designed to reduce the likelihood of officers with false teeth attempting oral sex in zero gravity, and watched as the virus followed her round a corner. Wondering vaguely how one went about taunting a piece of code, she slipped around a corner and back again, watching the thing tracing her movements. It followed, blindly, like a thing navigating by scent. The fear was palpable now, like a thin layer of plastic draped around her body, getting tighter as she moved.

            _What the hell am I doing here?_

            _And more than that...how am I going to get out of this?_

            She moved forward a little, into the sick orange glow of the worm, and suddenly the world was a much different place. The black void with its green lights receded, flickering away into nothing but blackness: there was no spatial differentiation between up, down, left, right, front or back. She floated in nothingness, too startled even to be afraid, and suddenly her thoughts were no longer her own.

            FLASH           

_...the pale lemon-coloured skies of Io in summer, and the desperate helpless pain of not understanding _why_ they were doing this to him...not understanding why the belt-beatings, why the cruel tricks with jam and ants, why the toilet-face-washings, why the desperate wretched loneliness among so many of his own people..._

FLASH

            _...the misery of the realization that, barring mindmerge technology, he would never in a million years pass the Academy entrance exam, while Frank, John and Howard rose inexorably up the ranks, bright, squarejawed stars of the Space Corps firmament: the utter, salt-bitter wretchedness of that knowledge that he would never be anything like as good as his brothers, and that his parents knew this, and were disgusted..._

FLASH

            _...little shards of memory here and there, enjoying the pure satisfaction of filling in his revision timetables with brilliant and saturated colour, keeping the hue perfectly within the lines, enjoying the fact that he _could_ do this, and do it better than...well.....anyone he knew: the revision was of course the important thing, but the loveliness of the timetables almost made up for the fact that he knew, deep down, that he'd end up embarrassing himself and waking up on a stretcher on his way to the medical bay, again, at the end of it all.._

FLASH

            _...the realization that he was dead, and that his death, along with the deaths of the entire crew, was his own stupid fault, as his entire life had been; and the quickly-following contention that it couldn't possibly all be his fault, that it was because he'd had a wretched life and no breaks and....._

_            ...and yeah, it was his fault, but he didn't have to _admit_ that to anyone, let alone Lister...a man whom he'd always disliked, ever since a certain disguised taxi-ride on Mimas..a man toward whom he held no respect whatsoever, yet whose mental health he had been resurrected to preserve, with no thoughts of his own...a man whose easy-going, what-the-hell attitude to life he had always envied, despite his firmly-held belief that Lister was a complete smeghead whose only function in life was to skew the crew-manifest psych assessment southwards in order to employ more than one on-board shrink..._

FLASH

            _...and the subsequent revelation, kept to himself, that the reason he loathed Lister so much was that he really truly did envy him and his ability to deal with life without giving in to the pointless cruelty of existence...and his own inability to explain this to Lister, and his lack of desire to do so..._

FLASH

            _...and the sudden awareness that he could touch others like him, the walking dead, ghosts made of light: the astonishingly beautiful feeling of _feeling_....of someone else's hair slipping down his face like rain, of warm fingers against his own, someone _holding_ him...no one had ever done that, not after they knew what he'd done, knew what a total utter waste of space he was; no one had ever let him rest against her shoulder, no one had ever stroked his hair and just let him be there with her, without either waiting for her mates to jump out from behind the screen and shriek with shrill laughter; no one had ever just let him be, before, without wanting anything in return..._

FLASH

            _...and now a sudden desire to continue to exist,stronger than the basic knee-jerk reaction to threats: the desire to exist and to possibly begin to enjoy existence...._

There was a moment of spatial uncertainty: Riley hung in the blackness, not entirely sure who she was or why she was there, and then some of her wandering synapses reconnected, and she realized whose personality array she'd just slid through without intending to. The low pain of energy being drained away had been a lot worse while she'd been flickering through Rimmer's memories; now, outside the program the worm was affecting, she felt reasonably strong again. Her mind was still reeling from the raw and helpless imagery she'd just been dragged through; the urgency of fixing the situation had suddenly been upgraded from yellow ochre (important) to vermilion (really smegging important). She slid out from behind a collection of subroutines and found herself face to face with the worm. 

            It had a face, actually. Or something that looked like it might have been a face: two darker spots in the poisonous orange lights

            _(deadlights)_

            that made up its head: paler orange glowed in the dark pits, like the pupils of unpleasant eyes. Riley shuddered, but hung firm in the blackness, and faced it.

            "Hullo," she said, aware that if it was intelligent, as it seemed likely, it wasn't going to understand her unless she communicated via binary data-stream, "I made you. I'm going to unmake you now."

            The virus-worm reared back, regarding her with those pinpoint eyes, and then surged forward. Riley jerked aside, panic flooding her, and slipped down a corridor between data storage arrays. She was dimly aware that the darkened v 1.8 section of the holo array was off to her left, and tried to steer towards it, fear making her responses immediate and sharp,  her mind feeling like iced shards of glass tinkling in a vacuum. 

            _Holly!_ she hissed, soundlessly. _Holly, are you tracking me?_

There was a pause, and the computer came back to her, the voice buzzing in her mind. _I'm tracking you, all right. What are you playing at?_

_            I'm trying to lead it out of the array—_She ducked as the worm's blunt head thrust itself down a hollow between two stacks of programming, and threw herself to one side, rolling and coming up again, keeping in motion. _Direct me—I can hardly tell where I'm going in here..._           Holly's voice sharpened a little, lost the bantering tone. _Left.__ Bear left round the corner and keep going as far as you can. _

_            Easier said than done. _She zigged again, forcing herself to hurry, unable to shake the mental image of running despite her current lack of a body, feeling it getting closer. The long, whippy end of its tail smashed into a stack of subroutines as it followed her round the corner, and she was dimly aware that something was wrong, now, in her databanks: something had changed. _Can't let it do too much of that or we'll be quadriplegic dead people..._

**

            Rimmer jerked awake, choking, not sure what had woken him: he had a curiously unpleasant feeling of being...invaded, as though something was running around inside him and occasionally bouncing off the walls. After a moment he remembered what it had been that had made him feel like this before: the polymorph, as it slithered through his personality array, chewing on whatever it found particularly toothsome...    

            He curled up, arms wrapped around himself, letting out a gasp as whatever-it-was got in a particularly good hit, and buried his face in the pillows so as not to cry out. _This has to be it. Has to be. I can't bear much more..._

**

            She could see the dormant subsector ahead in the blackness and forced herself to put on another burst of speed, desperate, hurtling down corridors between long-obsolete code strings, a particle and a wavelength at once. Behind her the virus-worm thrashed its way through the array, destroying chunks of code with careless flicks of its tail, as if it knew it wasn't going to get her and was settling for as much destruction as it could achieve. 

            The demarcation between the dormant subsector and the active part of the array was as thin as the edge of a shadow. Riley flung herself into the old programming, aware of a strange sourceless feeling of decay, and flattened herself against a corner as the virus-worm thundered by. With her last bit of strength she dove back out into the living sector of the holo projection array, and shrieked _Now, Holly! Do it now!_

            There was a silent, boneshaking vibration, and a flash of sickly orange light, and then there was simply nothing left of the old subsector, or the thing inside it. Riley slumped against a damaged stack of code and stared at it, or at least at where it'd used to be. 

            Outside, in the real world, Rimmer's body arched in spasm, his hands curled into fists, as he let out a shriek. By the time Lister, the Cat and Kryten appeared in the hatchway, heads poking around the door in a vertical line reminiscent of bad twentieth-century comic acts, the seizure had passed, and he lay completely still, the colour of good bond paper, one arm hanging off the bunk with a boneless relaxation that frightened Lister quite a bit. 

            "What's the matter with him?" he demanded of Kryten, who bent over the hologram and shrugged, shoulderplates clanking. "Is he...?"

            Kryten refrained from pointing out that Rimmer was already dead, and had been for over three million years now. He sent a tight-beam transmission to Holly, demanding updates, and his plastic eyes widened.

            "What _is_ it, man?" Lister asked.

            "It seems, Mr. Lister, sir, that your expert was successful in removing the virus from Mr. Rimmer's program." Kryten looked down at the unconscious Rimmer again. "The virus has been deleted from the ship. However, certain parts of the hologramatic projection array were damaged in the effort to contain the virus and will need to be repaired and reprogrammed."

            "What's all that mean?" demanded the Cat, who looked as if he'd have liked to poke Rimmer with a stick, if this had been possible. "Is goalpost-head here dead or what? I told you guys, I need to know, so I can plan my suits."

            "Cat?" Lister asked. 

            "Yeah, buddy?"

            "Shut up."

            to be continued. 


	6. 6

Full Circle Six

Disclaimer, as before. I own nothing except Riley and this rather hackneyed idea, which, if you have read any of my other fics, especially those featuring Knight Rider, will be immediately familiar. 

            Lister and the Cat were playing tabletop golf, desultorily, trying to waste time until Holly could give them another update on what the smeg was going on in the holo projection array. The Cat was currently on the fourteenth hole, par four, and was adjusting the little fans to give him a northeasterly breeze on his shot. 

            "Cat?" said Lister, morosely, staring into his bottle of self-heating sake. He was wearing what passed, with him, for pyjamas: a medium-raggedy Jets shirt and a pair of long-johns bottoms that had seen many better days. The Cat had changed into one of his elaborate golf outfits, this one featuring plus-fours in a livid puce print and a black cashmere sweater embroidered with complicated Art Deco swirls. He looked up and tipped his matching puce cap over one eye. 

            "Yeah, buddy?"

            "What if Rimmer doesn't make it?" Lister asked, not sounding as if he really wanted an answer. The Cat put down his miniature driver and tilted his head, sitting down beside Lister. 

            "Well," he said after a moment, "it means no more Hammond organ concerts, for a start."

            "Ca-aaat," Lister groaned. "Just..._try_ to be serious for once, all right?"

            "Okay. Look...we've been through all kinds of crap with goalpost-head, am I right? That time when we got sucked into his mind? Or the time when he was going to be in prison forever and ever cause he killed the whole crew? We always got through. He was always okay."

            Lister sighed. "Maybe you're right. I dunno...it just feels different. He _seems_ different."

            "What do you mean different?"

            "Like...he was thinking more, you know? Not just coming out with a quick answer. Actually thinking about what he was gonna say before he said it."

            The Cat frowned. "That's weird, Man. That ain't like him."

            "I know. I'm seriously bugging out about this, Cat."

            "Well," said the Cat, "let's distract you with some golf, huh? Quiet, okay, I gotta get this shot _juuuuust_ right."

            Lister reflected, watching him squint at the teeny-weeny flag across the table, that there was something comforting in the Cat's singleminded pursuit of happiness. Something...normal.

            He finished the bottle and selected a nine-iron for his next shot.

            **

            Holly was monitoring the status of both the holograms, and while she didn't necessarily know exactly what it was she was witnessing, she did know it was smegging weird. Riley's rather belligerent flight through the array had done considerable damage to the visual/spatial projection coding, which was why Rimmer's unconscious form kept flickering in and out of view and occasionally turning a fetching shade of blue. She'd told Riley what needed to be done to fix it, and Riley was rather tiredly knocking together chunks of software from inside the array. Holly didn't want to think about the fact that Riley was doing a better job than she currently could; there had been a time when Holly had known all there was to know about holo projection software, and could have fixed the worm's damage in the blinking of a human eye, but now she was reduced to watching and wondering what the smeg Riley was up to. 

            She also wondered what had happened to the insides of Rimmer's programming. She'd felt the surge when Riley had inadvertently fallen through Rimmer's personality records, and the strangeness in the circuits which had followed, and hadn't yet quite faded. There wasn't much going on now in Rimmer's mind, beside the echoing memories of pain, and Holly wondered if he was going to come back, after all this, and what he would be like. 

**

            Riley was so tired she could barely make her mind work, and since she was currently a collection of neuroelectric impulses, this was a bad thing. She'd been so long in the array that it had become something of an instinct to interact with the code sections; she didn't have to think about what she was doing, she just did it. The parts of the array that had been damaged _felt_ wrong, and she was now going just by feel, replacing blocks, drawing out tendrils of energy and patching connections, trying to replace what had been destroyed with what she had to hand. Dimly she was aware that the connections weren't exactly as they had been, but it was easier and quicker to do it this way than to attempt to rewrite the code from outside of the system.  She'd patched together much of what the worm had destroyed, but there were some complicated subroutines governing the light projection of the hologramatic image that were giving her trouble.  Most of her knew that she shouldn't mess with that which she didn't understand, but she was so damned tired that she didn't care that much anymore. With an effort she began rebuilding the missing blocks of code, fitting things in which looked like they belonged, crosspatching connections by feel. Each change she made affected her, as well, and she could feel the different connections slotting into place. So far none of them had felt terribly wrong. 

            She hoped that was a good thing.

            Hours later, weak and exhausted, Riley asked Holly to extract her from the array, having done all she could, and the computer loaded her back into her light bee. There was a dim dizzy feeling of disorientation, and then she was seeing through projected eyes again, and found herself half-lying on the edge of the counter in the suite.  She sat up, too fast, and had to hang on to the edge of the counter so as not to fall over in a heap. Something was kicking her brain, and for the life of her she couldn't figure out what it was. 

            _Never mind_, she thought dizzily, and pushed herself to her feet. The hallway came and went in great swooping heaves around her, as it had done on the one memorable and unpleasant time she'd taken someone up on the offer to get her seriously drunk, and she felt her way down toward the habitation decks. 

            **

            "Emergency," said Holly, tonelessly. "There's an emergency going on. It's still going on, and it's still an emergency. Will Dave Lister please hurry to the hologramatic projection suite."

            A few minutes later Lister skidded around the corner and found an interesting tableau laid out for his observation: Riley, still wearing a green Rimmer uniform which was now ripped and torn, the tunic half-open and sweat-stained, showing more of the comm officer than he had hitherto viewed, was lying curled on the floor of the corridor just outside the holo projection suite. Her hair had come undone and was spread out in a puddle of pale-gold on the floor tiles; her eyes were closed. She was breathing shallowly. Instinctively, Lister reached out for her shoulder, before remembering he wasn't going to be able to touch her—and this preconception was so strong that it wasn't until he felt the thin bones of her arm shift under his touch that he realized he _was_ touching her. 

            He jerked his hand back as if she'd burned him. "Hol?" he said, in a strengthless voice. "Hol, what the livid _smeg_ is going on here?"

            "Not sure," said the computer after a moment. "But it seems that Riley did something to the projection array when she was repairing the damage which has resulted in....I suppose you'd call it hardlight."

            Lister shook his head wonderingly and bent over further, lifting her from the floor. She sagged bonelessly in his arms. "Can you scan her?" he asked. "Is she all right?"

            Holly narrowed her pixelated eyes in concentration. "Sheer exhaustion. She'll be fine."

            "What..." Lister stopped, and started again. "What's happened to Rimmer?"

            "Not sure. I think...I think he's got the same thing."

            "You mean he's...got a physical body now? Like her?"

            "I think so."

            Lister stared down at Riley, who was still doing an excellent imitation of a CPR dummy. "Well," he said after a moment. "Shit."

**

            Some time later, he, Kryten and the Cat were staring at computer readouts in the Science Room. Everything they were looking at told them the same, inconceivable story. Somehow Riley's half-arsed repair job on the computer code had caused—possibly with the help of the virus—a complete alteration in the way the lightbees projected their images, and the way they interfaced with physical/spatial objects. Somehow, Riley—and Rimmer, who was likewise unconscious—had physical bodies. They could touch, they could feel, they could affect their environment. They were no longer light-ghosts.

            "Wow," said the Cat. "Does this mean he's not gonna be trying to steal our bodies anymore?"

            "I should certainly hope not," said Kryten, who still hadn't got over his guilt-loop from the last time he'd let Rimmer convince him that the other two crew members had definitely freely offered him the use of their bodies, no worries, it was all above-board. "I don't quite understand the technology myself, but it seems that Miss Riley has managed to give Mr. Rimmer what he's always wanted."

            Lister looked at him, considered making a number of remarks, and figured it was too easy. "Yeah," he said, "well, now what are we gonna do? What's she gonna do?"

            "If I was her," said the Cat, "get some highlights and start wearing a little eyeliner, y'know, just to bring out the colour of her eyes a bit. I have some tips I could give her on what colours she ought to be wearing with her complexion."

            Lister fought back a horrible mental picture. "I bet you do, Cat.  What I _meant_ was, is she gonna want to be switched back off again, or is she gonna stay here?"

            "I believe that is up to her, Mr. Lister," said Kryten sourly, not in love with the prospect of Riley taking up permanent residence on the _Dwarf_. 

            "What is?" said another voice from the doorway. They all turned to see Rimmer, green tunic gleaming dimly in the monitors' glow, leaning against the hatchframe. There was no question about it: he was leaning. He could touch. He did have a physical form. 

            "Uh, nothing, man," said Lister. "How you feeling?"

            Rimmer came forward into the Science Room proper, and they all stared at him. With the new hardlight projection system, he looked pretty much as he always had, with the addition of a shadow; however, his constant look of petty misery had been replaced with one of barely disguised wonder. Lister noticed that he was running his fingers over the edges of the consoles, as if trying to convince himself he really could touch them. 

            "Great," he said, almost sounding surprised. "I feel...great. What's going on? I can...I can touch things! I can _feel _things! I stubbed my toe getting out of the bunk and it felt better than anything I can remember feeling!"

            "You're strange," said the Cat, looking down his nose at Rimmer. 

            "Don't you get it? It was real, real pain! I could actually _feel_ it! It was _real_!"

            "Yeah," said Lister, looking around for something strong to drink. "Listen, man. It seems like Riley kind of did this by accident when she was trying to repair your programming."

            Rimmer looked up from the keyboard he was caressing, looking oddly young and uncertain of himself. "Really?"

            "Yes," cut in Holly, "this is one of those things we can put in the "sheer dumb luck" file."

            "I thought I was dreaming," said Rimmer absently. "I thought it was a dream. And I still do, although I've been pinching myself for a while." He held out a wrist spotted with little bruises.

            "It's real all right, man," said Lister, wondering where the smeg he'd gone wrong to be stuck in a situation like this. He didn't _remember_ running over any angelic small children or beating old ladies over the head with walking sticks. Maybe karma just hated him. "Listen...maybe it should be you who talks to Riley, finds out what she wants to do."

            "What do you mean?"

            "Well...she doesn't really belong here, man." Lister listened to himself, thinking how much of a git he sounded. Who was he to say where anyone belonged, marooned on a ship three million years away from Earth? 

            Rimmer narrowed his eyes. "All right," he said after a moment. "Where is she?"

            "We put her in one of the unused officers' quarters on our deck," said Lister. "She's gonna be out for a while."

            "What? Is she all right?"

            "Hol says she'll be fine." Lister gave him an unrealistic grin.

            "Right," said Rimmer, and was gone, his footsteps echoing down the hall. Lister couldn't help wondering how much of a favour Riley had really done them, after all. 

tbc


End file.
